Tag Archives: Universal Background Checks

For new arrivals, I’ve been writing to “news” outlets and the writers of published gun-related misinformation. Call it education or calling them out on lies, I’m trying to correct bad reporting. Mostly, I an simply ignored, which indicates they know they’re wrong, and are disseminating BS deliberately. Once it’s clear that the outlet/writer is not interested in allowing facts to run, I’ve been posting my attempts here.

Today’s entry is a little bit different.

A focus on gun safety – not control – leaves 2nd Amendment intact
Our civil rights are under attack, and have been for some time. The freedom to assemble etched out in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution is under attack by the Second Amendment — and it shouldn’t be. Jason Aldean’s concert was a peaceful assembly ravaged by a lone gunman who, for all intents and purposes, had the right of gun ownership.

What is it with doctors lying about firearms issues lately? 744 words of misdirection and falsehoods. I sent a proposed guest column of 721 words to rebut. To the Orlando Sentinel’s partial credit, they didn’t ignore me completely, as usually happens.

They told me to pare it down to 250 words or less and they’d consider it for a Letter to the Editor.

I couldn’t do it. There were too many Levy lies for 250 words. I got it down to 444 (remember, even my original column was shorter than Levy’s offering), by leaving out some specific references, and using more abbreviations and… not-so-great grammar.

They turned it down. So here it is.

Disingenuous Doctor

Doctor Marc Levy’s October 27, 2017 column, “A focus on gun safety – not control – leaves 2nd Amendment intact,” is as lacking in candor as the very column title, suggesting that delaying and infringing on rights somehow protects them.

Levy attempts another bit of misdirection in noting that Obamacare has a provision that prevents the collection of information on firearms. I’m sure that a doctor in Florida is well aware that Medicare/Medicaid sidestepped the law by implementing a rule requiring doctors to use Electronic Medical Records software, produced by nongovernmental agencies, which include questions on patient access to firearms in the intake questionnaire. Any doctor with Medicare/Medicaid patients will be asking that, while the CMS innocently proclaims, “WE aren’t requiring it.”

Dr. Levy also appears to be a fan of “universal background checks” (more accurately called preemptively-prove-your-innocence”), so that criminals and other prohibited persons could not obtain guns. He avoids the little problem that most firearm-equipped criminals already obtain their weapons unlawfully, and that the Supreme Court’s HAYNES decision upholds
criminals’ Fifth Amendment rights to not self-incriminate by reporting their unlawful activity; i.e.- criminals cannot be required to undergo background checks.

Levy mentions “assault rifles” as he wonders why we don’t track firearms purchases. Either he is unaware that assault rifles are heavily restricted, regulated, taxed, and registered; or he doesn’t want readers to realize that he’s talking about semiautomatic sporting and defense tools. Perhaps he meant to say “assault weapons,” a term with no legal meaning in Florida or federal law; only a handful of states use the entirely subjective term.

The doctor claims that all “responsible” gun owners approve of his restrictions: registration, taxation, limits on ownership, prior restraint on the exercise of a right, and more. Since I do not, that is demonstrably false, unless Levy has invented his own bizarre definition of “responsible.”

Similar claims that “90% of Americans favor Universal Background Checks” don’t hold water. A few years ago in Washington state, polls alleged that 90% of Washingtonians wanted UBCs; but when it went to an actual vote (Initiative 594), fewer than 60% voted in favor, missing the claim by over thirty points, and more than 40% opposed.

Levy sidesteps other questions. Estimates of American gun owners range from a ridiculous fifty-five million to a possibly overly optimistic one hundred-twenty million. Estimates of firearms range from two hundred sixty-five million to a three quarters of a billion. Given the lack of knowledge demonstrated by that remarkable uncertainty, how does Levy propose to determine who has what? How does he propose to pry “extra” firearms out of the homes of those with “too many?” Does he expect dubious owners, who won’t tell a telephone poller what arms he possesses, to self-report to a government intent on registration and confiscation? Or does he advocate searching every single, individual domicile in the country? That’s a lot of doors to kick in, and when the California legislature first proposed mass confiscations of “assault weapons” several years ago, a police union spokesman announced they’d see the largest outbreak of “blue flu” in history if implemented.

Perhaps Dr. Levy and the other estimated one million doctors in America will volunteer to do the door-kicking; they outnumber the FBI’s estimate of fewer than 700,000 law enforcement officers anyway.

Consider those fifty-five to one hundred-twenty million gun owners; then consider the roughly thirteen thousand firearms-related homicides. If each homicide represented an individual shooter and gun, that’s 0.01-0.02% of all firearm owners and 0.001-0.005% of firearms. While personal tragedies, statistically homicides are “black swan” events.

Those tiny fractions of a single percentage point do not point to a gun problem or gun owner problem. There is a criminal problem. Perhaps Dr. Levy should lobby for a gangbanger tax to fund criminal violence research.

My mother is gone; others may be saved
My 75-year-old mother, Ruth, and her friend had been shot and killed. My mother had taken a trip to visit her friend who lived in a retirement community. They were drinking coffee and reading the newspaper when strangers robbed them and took their lives in a single instant.
[…]
the glaring loophole in New Mexico state law that allows criminals, domestic abusers and other dangerous people to obtain guns from unlicensed sellers with no background check, no questions asked. SB 48/HB 50 would close this deadly loophole by requiring a criminal background check for all gun sales.

No honest folks really want violent criminals walking around with guns (although one might also wonder what the violent criminals are doing on the loose in the first place, if they’re known). But Brulé fails to explain how universal PPYI checks would have stopped her mother’s murders. After all…

So, Brulé, how would your background checks stop a couple of guys, apparently with no disqualifying convictions, from purchasing a firearm? From anyone, including an FFL who has to go through NICS?

Another question: Given that, in Haynes, the Supreme Court has rulled that felons cannot be forced to self-incriminate on firearms charges, how do victim disarmers propose to force disqualified persons to comply with PPYI? Your police state dream law would only apply to honest people. You know, the ones who aren’t the problem.

Third question: Even if SCOTUS suddenly decided to toss the Fifth Amendment, how do you victim-disarming whackos propose to preemptively stop strawman purchases?

When victim-disarming ban bunnies start suggesting laws that don’t infringe on honest people’s right, and do apply to the real criminal predators, I might stop regarding them as liars or idiots. Or both.

My “safety,” Mr. Carr, is only a “threat” to someone credibly threatening me with death or bodily injury. If you consider me a threat to you, I’d like you to explain why you’re planning to kill me.

The victim disarming rights-violators frequently claim that we need to have a rational discussion about guns, and whine that RKBA proponents won’t listen to them. This is why: their idea of “rational” is a display of a pathological fear of inanimate tools. They fail to realize that universal preemptively-prove-your-innocence backgrounds checks are not going to be conducted by the 70% of criminals who get their firearms through illicit transactions, nor that they cannot even be required to do so.

The victim disarmers cite research that claims to have studied the laws that best correlate with lowered gun deaths, and conclude that firearm identification (whether through ballistic fingerprinting or microstamping) would help lower deaths by 90%, even though only two states have even had ballistic fingerprinting databases, and one of those gave it up after 15 years of it never leading to a single arrest (and no one has microstamping yet). We are expectedly to “rationally” accept a study that literally cannot support the conclusions it drew because the data is nonexistent or directly contradicts the claim.

To the victim disarming blood dancers, it is rational to believe that surveys in Washington state showed that 90% of the people wanted universal PPYI checks, when less than 60% would actually vote for it.

We are to accept as “rational” the idea that a convicted felon on probation, under a restraining order, who obtained his gun via an illegal straw purchase, and killed 3, and injured 14 would have been stopped by universal PPYI checks.

Two blood dancers from Sandy Hook Promise gave statements to the New Hampshire legislature that it would be “rational” to believe that universal PPYI checks would have stopped that school killer, who obtained his weapons by killing his mother in her bed and stealing her guns.

“Rational” discussion would accept that gun deaths are increasing, and are caused by the increasing number of guns, when the rate of gun deaths is at the lowest level in decades (while guns per capita is at a record level).

Let’s have that rational discussion just as soon as your doctors get your medications balanced.

Ed. note: This commentary appeared first on TZP’s weekly email alert. If you would like to be among the first to see new commentary (as well as to get notice of new polls and recaps of recent posts), please sign up for our alert list. (See sidebar or, if you’re on a mobile device, scroll down). Be sure to respond when you receive your activation email!

While the Obamas remain on their tax-funded ‘free’ tropical vacation, Internet chatter drones on over what form his reported gun control by imperial diktat will take. Based on unsourced leaks, the most likely initial act will be to redefine those in the business of selling firearms to include darned near everyone. I myself have suggested that ― as the FAA did with toy drones, and the EPA did with CO2 ― he might even redefine some firearms to include them as NFA items. After all, the ATF once did that very thing with a shoelace.

Possibly the best way to deal with such efforts to render more honest people helpless is simple noncompliance: No. Your move.

And there is malicious compliance. These are just some idle thoughts of my own on the best way to ensure you’ve complied with all the possible rules; certainly not official TZP policy (it isn’t as if I’m an officer of the company).

You’re suddenly a ‘dealer’ in the eyes of the law(less)? You’ll need a six month supply of those free 4473s from the ATF. Naturally, all of you anticipate Cabela’s-scale business, right?

If some devices get reclassified as NFA, it might be a good idea for every single gun owner in America (absurdly lowball estimates of 60 million to a hopeful 120 million) to ensure none of their property is affected. Remember that shoestring.

Send letters demanding clarification to the ATF’s Firearms Technology Branch (Firearms and Ammunition Technology Division 244 Needy Road Martinsburg, Suite 1600 West Virginia 25405 USA, E-mail address: fire_tech@atf.gov, Voice: 304-616-4300, Fax number: 304-616-4301). One item per letter; you’ll want separate files should you be inspected, to match paperwork with item. Probably you should check on each of your individual magazines, too. Airguns, blowpipes, bows, your potato cannon. Junior’s Nerf guns. All of them. It would be a shame if you made typos so that you had to send multiple letters per item; just timestamp them so the FTB boys can sort out the most recent version.

Stick to snailmail to ensure a legal paper trail. Keep copies.

All 60-120 million of you. As an extra benefit, imagine the coituscluster at the Martinsburg Post Office; you’re providing job security for USPS workers.

Registration is another bugaboo that never quite seems to go away; California, New York, Connecticut… And now we have HR 4269 (the new ‘assault weapon’ ban bill). That one grandfathers some weapons. It isn’t hard to imagine a registration mandate being added by amendment. How else can they be sure that AK-15 you have is one of the legal ones?

Of course, you’ll have to give them your address on all those classification (and maybe registration) letters. If you’re like me, you may get mixed up on your home address. This tool can help you with that.

Heck, while you’re at it, go ahead and register a couple million potentially existent drones with the FAA.

“Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.”~~John Donne

I attended a showing of The Holocaust: Through their eyes at the Jewish Community Center. It is the accounts of local holocaust survivors. Not people who heard about it from their distant cousin or parents, but lived it, survived it.

According to one of the survivors, in 1930 Berlin, hitler’s SS beat to death 8 Jews who were walking down the street. That was the start of the spiral down. The harassment of Jews in public places had already started, the anti-Jewish notices and slogans had started. But these were the first deaths. That act was the start of the holocaust, no matter what other signs there were or were not, THAT was the start, according to this survivor.

Some of the survivors seemed astonished that their non-Jewish friends began to turn against them, people they had known for years, played with, grown up with would no longer associate with them. Not only would they not associate with them, they turned on them. There was a government who’s leader had the opinion that “The personification of the devil as the symbol of all evil assumes the living shape of the Jew” and a very obliging media who was willing to spread the message. I suppose it should be no big surprise that when a population constantly hears a message it eventually wears down resistance & rational thought. The persecution was embedded in laws like the Nuremberg laws, which defined who and who was not a Jew according to the Reich, and based on those definitions what people were allowed to do, and who they were allowed to marry or be with. The discrimination further curtailed privileges such as riding on a bus, going to a public park or sitting on a bench in a park. All decreed by having one Jewish Grandparent. Then it became Jews weren’t allowed to go to school and Gentiles weren’t allowed to go into Jewish homes. Then they were denied the ability to own a radio, or animals. One lady talked about how the family had a pet dog and a bird, they had to get rid of them. My heart just broke for her, you could tell, hers still hurt. With all she had endured, the loss of the pets still hurt. Then the Jews were denied service. The baker, butcher, barber refused to serve Jews. More than one of those interviewed talked about people they had known most of their lives that were turning against them. Labensraum was begun, the German policy of taking land belonging to those that the nazis considered inferior. Because in their deluded minds, taking land from the inferior people to give me superior people “living space” and room to grow food was necessary. The nazis felt this was a fair way to encourage and increase the natural vigor of the superior race.

Then hitler was elected in Austria. Anschluss, March 12, 1938, when the Austrians welcomed the Germans rolling down the streets with cheers and waves. Banners were unfurled out of windows, swastika pins appeared on lapels and in parks signs stating “No dogs and Jews” appeared. Austria was not invaded, the Austrians choose this. And again, the turning away of life long friends, their scorn and derision on open display. The painful realization those people had never been their friends. They had always hated them, it was just that now it was permissible to publicly show the hatred.

Then Kristallnacht, “Night of the broken glass” 9-10 November 1938. A series of pogroms that caused the death of between 1-2 thousand when the total includes those that died in German custody, concentration camps and suicide as a result of what they suffered are included. Over 1 thousand Synagogues were burned and Jewish owned businesses and homes were destroyed.

One lady talked about being a 16 year old girl the night the Germans came to their home at 0400. They told her Father to walk outside. As he was complying they shot him in front of her, six times and left him in the doorway for the family.

On December 7th, the day America’s Pearl Harbor was attacked the first of the Jews were sent to be gassed. The witnesses that spoke of this seemed saddened that so many don’t realize that was the day the gassings started. One witness talked about how the nazis would enter a town, drive the people to the town center square then take them to a building, like a brewery to sort them. Who lives, who dies? As one witness stated matter of fact, if you were old, or very young or sick, you had no chance. Up the chimney you would go, they said. If you were healthy you would be sent to a camp to work. One survivor of the Gross-Rosen camp talked about eating grass and snow to survive. Germans liked starving people to death.

Of one ghetto in a Polish town that had once held 5000 souls only 3 survived. One lady told of enduring 25 lashes for being caught with a pound of butter. Another told of seeing a baby being thrown at a truck, another recounted the brave German soldiers tearing a baby into pieces and throwing it out the window. Remember, these are not stories that were handed down by grandparents, these are the things the witnesses saw themselves.

At camp you got to keep your clothes, and there would be 150-200 people per barrack. You were given a blanket, a bowl and a cup and then maybe some food for the first time in two days. One man said they had to sing. Once a day they were given some noodle or potato soup. On those meager rations you worked from day to night. The prisoners would lay pipe, and shovel coal despite having no shoes, and that was the women. One man painted portraits of the Russian guards for food. One recounted how they became very good at realizing about a week out when someone was going to die within the week.

One addressed the question of why didn’t they fight back? More than one reason it seems. The first was possession of a weapon was a death sentence. And thanks to the German version of Universal Background Checks it was easy to know who had what where, so when Jews were forbidden to own guns it was easy to divest them of their now illegal guns. The other factor he mentioned was how weak, physically, everyone was. He said with the amount of food you got, you were lucky to survive, let alone fight or run. It sounds like it was less than a moochelle obama school lunch. He also pointed out even if you got away, you are wearing a stripped uniform, you are tattooed, gaunt and they have cut your hair into a reverse Mohawk, and go where? Although one lady did have her means of resistance. She passed on Jewish history and knowledge to the children.

In 1943 from 19 April to 16 May the Warsaw Ghetto uprising took place. It was the largest single revolt by Jews during WWII, and they held off the Germans longer than the whole country of Poland. But poorly armed with virtually non-existent re-supply they were finally overrun.

One talked about being on the cattle cars the Germans used. They said if the boxcar held 100, they would cram 150 in. The witness talked about little children and old people in those boxcars. They said there was no food or sanitation. They would drive the boxcars back and forth for 11 days. For 11 days the people in those boxcars would starve, vomit, defecate and die. Mothers would be trying, Fathers would be praying and no one was listening and 60% died.

One witness talked about getting to Auschwitz. The guards would yell “Rouse rouse” Come quick. They signaled to go left or right. If you went to the right, you went to the barracks, if you went to the left “You went to the crematory and up the chimney”. If you didn’t move fast enough they hit you, if you still didn’t move fast enough they shot you. Some saw their whole family murdered. More than one talked about the sky high fires.

In 1945 the Allies arrived and the death marches to the next camps started. They weren’t allowed to take a blanket and it was winter. Maybe 10-20 below. There was no food and anything that could be grabbed along the way was, corn, wheat, potatoes, beets anything they saw, they would grab and share with the others. Of the 55,000 that left the camp 12,000 survived to arrive at the next death camp.

In April of 1945 when the Allies found the death camps they initially had no scope of the magnitude of what they were seeing. Then they realized they prisoners were mostly civilians, so weak and with heads like skulls, words mumbled and garbled. They found bodies not fully burned and wagon loads of bodies to be burned. The soldiers were shocked. They had heard about the camps but didn’t realize what they were hearing meant in reality.

Reality? While the dead by category differs according to different researchers it’s basically around 6 million Jews, or 78% of German occupied Europe were murdered. Roma, or Gypsies 130,000 to 1,500,000 depending on which researcher. Handicapped, 200,000 to 250,000 were murdered, POWs around 3.1 million, Ethnic Poles 1.8-1.9 million. Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians lost around 13.7 million including 2 million Jews. 10,000-15,000 Homosexuals died in the concentration camps. Around 1,000-2,000 Catholic clergy, 1,000 Jehovah’s Witnesses and some Freemasons were killed in the camps. The price tag for vulnerability is very, very high.

One lady talked about what to do after liberation. Where do you go? You could stay in the camp, but no one wanted to, and most no longer had a home.

Ok, so the camps are liberated, all is well now, right? Not so much. July 4, 1946The Kielce Pogrom took place.

The soldiers and the policemen then went into the building. Jews were told to surrender their weapons, but not all of the residents obeyed the order. The entry of the policemen and the soldiers into the Jewish house marked the beginning of the pogrom. Excerpts from testimony supplied by people who witnessed the outbreak of the pogrom describe what followed.

Ewa Szuchman, resident of the house on Planty Street, said:After the police took away the weapons, the crowd broke into the Kibutz ( on the second floor) and policemen started shooting at the Jews first. They killed one and wounded several others. Albert Grynbaum, another inhabitant of the Jewish house who was on the first floor, said: The soldiers went up to the second floor. Several minutes later two Jews came to me and told me that the soldiers were killing Jews and looting their property. It was then that I heard shots. After the shooting on the second floor, shots were heard from the street and inside the building.

Apparently by then some of the people had learned when the government starts demanding groups of people hand over their weapons bad things are about to happen. Unfortunately not enough of them were armed to stop what was coming. And this was AFTER the war had ended. One man told of his brother going in to try to get their Mother and his Girlfriend out. The man said his brother was never seen again.

One witness told of coming to America, seeing the Statue of Liberty and looking at the crowds of people waiting to greet loved ones getting off the ship, and he had no one. It’s not just that there wasn’t anyone there to greet him, it’s that he literally had NO ONE.

The witnesses had messages for us. How fragile is liberty and civilization. Life is precious and wonderful. Change the world around yourself. Not my children, not nobody’s children should have to live through what we lived through. I didn’t want to tell people because I’ve never gotten over that my family died. My Mom was 45, my sister 22 and another sister 25, a brother 10 and a little nephew 2 or 3. I tell people what happened so it won’t happen again. I saw it with my own eyes. People helped me rebuild my life. I live in a world that has changed, the holocaust can’t happen again, then I realize it IS happening again in other parts of the world. And their suffering becomes our suffering.

One witness talked about hearing of hilter and eva braun’s deaths after he was liberated from the camp. He said they are dead and we are alive. We have won. That is how I defined victory.

With all due respect, this is NOT how I define victory. I would define victory as when the nazi’s tried to enact their Nuremberg laws and used their universal background checks to begin gun confiscation people would have seen the writing on the wall and stopped it right then. Yes, I do think the Christians would have needed to stand with their Jewish neighbors and realized that the only hope any of them had was to stand together. Had it happened? Millions of people would not have died. We can not compromise to “common sense gun laws”. We can not compromise to political correctness. We can not compromise to universal background checks. We can not compromise to phony public opinion polls. We can not compromise to phony anti-gun groups funded by anti-gun millionaires with armed security guards. We can cease to support Hollywood anti-gun liberals with armed security guards. We can look critically at the choices of Second Amendment groups and pick the ones that truly fight for our rights. Now we have choices, use them wisely. Resolve to do something each day to regain our liberty. Be resolved, we are. The Zelman Partisans, no compromise, no surrender, ever.

I’m not really Israeli, I’m not Jewish, but I care deeply about Yad Vashem, and you should too. Why? Read on.

Get coffee, get a BIG cup of coffee.

This was my first big adventure, after landing at Ben Gurion airport with it’s plaque telling when it was freed by the IDF on the 10th of July 1948 in the War for Independence.

The visit to Yad Vashem starts out in a theater. It has a looping film showing slices of life, conversation and music in the days before the madness began. It’s like being behind the lens of a camera that is panning a street. There are apartment buildings and you see people through the windows doing things like having dinner, practicing a violin, teaching, visiting. Then you might see a office building, or a factory. Through their windows you see people doing things. Eventually the panning shifts and you see country side with people working, children playing. Slices of normal life, the way life should have remained for them, but didn’t. Yad Vashem covers why it didn’t, what happened when it didn’t and the final “victory”, which it was, but at a fearful price.

The first of the displays talks about what life was like, before the nazis (nazis don’t deserve capital letters) really had power, they were just beginning to grow in their influence. How many of the Jews were professional people, like doctors, lawyers, teachers. Many if not most, I imagine, of the children went to school, like other children. They had families, lives and their synagogues. Slowly that began to change. Initially Germans resisted the attempts to vilify their neighbors that had lived among them for so long. It took hitler (he doesn’t get capital letters either) a while to change people’s mindsets. When he first began to attempt to blame the Jews for all the ills Germany was undergoing, they didn’t buy in. Given time, and help they were not only willing to turn a blind eye, they did buy in.

I think if we look at where some of that help came from and what it was it could be very useful for us today. What is it they say? Those who ignore the past are doomed to repeat it.

I guess one of the things that struck me about how life was “before” was the feeling of trust. The Jews thought they were safe. The Germans, Poles, and others were their neighbors. They had “coexisted” for a very long time. Co-exist is a lovely sentiment, makes a darling bumper sticker (or an advertisement for who would be an easy target when things go south) and if all parties were willing it would be wonderful. But history seems to show us one of the parties in the “coexist” will decide they don’t want to “coexist” they want to rule, or destroy another party, and they set about doing it. The rest of the museum deals with the result of the “coexist” mindset.

Some of the exhibits, many actually would have film clips you could watch. Some of footage shot during the holocaust, some of survivors, some of observers. One was of a woman that told of her Mother having made a hiding place in the closet and when the nazis would come she would shove them in it. The last time the nazis came she talked them into letting her get her coat. She opened the closet, quietly said “Good-bye girls, if I’m not back by night, go to the TenBooms” I have to wonder if that would be Corrie TenBoom, the author of “The Hiding Place”. Quite a book and a movie. She didn’t come back. Some of the people knew who betrayed them. It was their friends, and neighbors. People they had known and trusted for years. But why would these former friends betray them to such a horrific fate? The museum had some very compelling evidence how it could happen.

A very charismatic leader came to power using the slogan “Hope and Change”, whoops wrong slogan, hitler’s was just “Hope”. Hope for Germany. Germany had been in a sad state of affairs since the last war they started, their debt was crushing them. And Mr. Germany (who wasn’t really German) knew who to blame. The Jews, he was very upfront about his feelings, but the low info voters blew off the warning signs in his book Mein Kampf. So hitler promised Germans he would provide ice cream, rainbow strew and free hitler phones to all when he was elected. He purchased a newspaper to spread his screed. Tyrants today do not need to go to such lengths as the print media is pretty well on board and does the screed spreading for free, as they’ve bought in to the ideology. Pretty much the same with TV, for those that get out of line and really are investigative journalists you can read my post on Sharyl Atkisson. Or perhaps study the late Andrew Breitbart. And, he had his new propaganda minister to help out. I don’t know if the media back then were willing participants, or if they were forced but you began to see “cartoons” of Jews handing out poison candy to unsuspecting children. In fact there is a whole collection of these cartoons. Some of them were used in schools, proving “common core” is really nothing new. You can see several of them here. http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/thumb.htm They sort of remind me of the way that cartoonist for the Kansas City “Red Star” portrays gun owners. I haven’t taken that rag for years, if they can’t report a story involving a firearm accurately after it has happened why would I think anything else they report is accurate? Vilification of Jews in cartoons was nothing new, it occurred in the middle ages as well, and the nazis happily revived some of the old woodcuts. Wikipedia has info here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewpig it’s called Judensau. I will tell you before you look, it’s vile, the only reason I’m giving the link is I saw a platter with that woodcut image in the museum. Yep, people served food on them, there were also plates so people ate off them.

The culture was changing that made it not only acceptable but desirable to isolate and vilify one group of people. An artist named Charlotte Salomon (Apr 1917-10 Oct 1943 Auschwitz) did a series of paintings that chronicled her life entitled “Life or Theater”. They showed the changes in life the longer the nazis were in power. Her family had been quite comfortable before all the “hopey-changey” stuff took place. Her Dad was a surgeon, which became one of the prohibited professions for Jews. Charlotte had gained University acceptance to the United State school of pure arts, but in time she refused to go as it wasn’t safe. She and her husband fled to France where she continued to paint. When the nazis intensified their search in France for Jews, she and her husband were found. They were sent to Auschwitz, she was gassed the day she arrived and she was pregnant. Charlotte had turned over her paintings to a trusted friend for protection. She told the friend they were her life, she painted frantically towards the end. She lives on through the series of paintings. You can read more about Charlotte in wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlotte_Salomon

There was a picture of a beautiful young girl, she had long thick auburn braids in the picture. The braids are in the display case below, still braided, still thick and rich in auburn color. The owner long ago murdered. Part of the piles of things collected in the camps, like hair, teeth, glasses, shoes, some of this was re-purposed for the German army. And piles of bones and bodies, lots of the bodies those things used to belong to. The jewelry of course had been confiscated.

My hands down favorite part of the museum was the section dedicated to the resistance. It was pitifully small. When you realize what the nazis did to the children of G-d, I suspect it might make the Egyptians look like a bad date. The weapons of resistance were pitifully few, and pitifully poor. I saw a rifle labeled as a pistol grip. Phooey! It was a rifle with the stock broke off. I’m sure it was easier to hide, but that’s all it was. There was one or two magazines laying beside it. Yes, there were a few other things in that section, but not enough. There should have been a room piled with magazines, rifles and all manner of things that had been used to defend the people. Two quotes struck me from this section.

Today it will be half a year since our destruction began [July 1942]. Had we but resisted then, at least as much as we resisted during the last deportation [January 1943], the Nazis would not have succeeded so easily in destroying such a large Jewish community. If the Jews had at the very least not gone of their own free will, but stubbornly hidden as they have been doing in the last few days – then the deportation would have lasted for months on end. One shudders to think that it required a quarter of a million Jews to give their lives, for the remainder to understand the reality of the situation and come to the right conclusions. From the diary of Shmuel Winter

and

“It is impossible to put into words what we have been through. What happened exceeded our boldest dreams. The Germans fled twice from the ghetto… My life’s dream has come true. Defense in the ghetto has become a fact. Armed Jewish resistance and revenge are actually happening. I have witnessed the glorious and heroic combat of the Jewish fighters.”~~Mordechai Anielewicz, Warsaw Ghetto, April 1943

I had coffee with a friend not long ago, we were talking about this. I said “If I were in charge, Yad Vashem would be a very different place. There would be rooms and rooms showing the different methods that were used to fight off an aggressor dedicated to erasing a section of the population off the face of the earth”. There would have been rooms showing the trials, and what happened to those that became tyrants and served tyrants. There would have been rooms dedicated to the victory celebration and one room to commemorate the six people that died fighting to save the lives of the innocents, because six people would have been all of the innocents that died. The death toll on the tyrant side would have been much higher.

So while the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto realized they were in a fight for their lives (finally) and news of the uprising began to come out, the rest of the world seems to have emitted a collective yawn. And so the poison gas flowed through the sewers, the tanks rolled in, fire spread and the people died. In recent times events have occurred that should make people sit up and take notice or at least open their eyes a bit wider in alarm, seems only to prompt only the changing of the channel to American Idol and people grab a coke with a smile. Putin rolls into the Ukraine and barry draws another red line in the sand. Isn’t it interesting that Putin is using the same excuse hitler did to invade countries? Well, when a country has ineffective leadership (at least in a positive direction, taking the country down the drain he’s a master at) you get things like the first lady holding up a sign begging a terrorist group to give back kidnapped girls. Yeah Mooch, that’ll do it.

Women in the camps didn’t have it any easier. They had to deal with things like Bloody Brigitte, she always struck till there was blood, she released her dogs on the prisoners. This sadistic German nurse spent time in prison for her crimes. I’m quite sure the prison she spent time in was much nicer than the ones she presided over.

There were also displays of pieces of medical equipment that could be used to determine if someone was Jewish, based on facial feature measurements. Now we don’t need those things, we have biometrics. They had helpful little “family tree” examples to determine the fate of someone’s life based on their grandparents.

I tend to look at patterns, and I’m seeing one. I’m seeing a pattern of a segment of a population being vilified by politicians, cartoonist ridiculing political and religious beliefs. Any attempt by the pitifully small remnant of a “news” media to point out the corruption is stifled. Anyone speaking out against it can look forward to IRS intervention to shut them down. And one party has called for the IRS to shut down political dissent. And yet from those espousing “tolerance” (but only for certain groups) are the very ones that push such policies using bully politics. You think people aren’t losing their jobs because of political or religious beliefs? Ask a pair of twin brothers that lost their new show on HGTV because it came out they were……..sssshhhhh, “Christians”. The same tactics have been tried against a store selling chicken sandwiches and a man that made & sells duck calls. WOW. So, HGTV pulled the new show. Darn, I will miss “Property Brothers”, but hey, they don’t want “my kind” of viewer,so I will oblige them, and their sponsors. You know, that’s the thing about a pattern, I’ve never bought a pattern for a shirt and ended up with a saddle blanket. They are worth paying attention to.